Quotes About Interdependence

Even if two people have a baby together, they are still separate. Each of us remains in isolation. It's not by living together, or by having sexual relations, or even by having children together that we can dispel this feeling of isolation. We can only dispel our mutual isolation when we practice mindfulness and are able to truly come home to ourselves and each other.

The well-being of your body is not possible without the well-being of the planet.

About thirty years ago I was looking for an English word to describe our deep interconnection with everything else. I liked the word "togetherness," but I finally came up with the word "interbeing." The verb "to be" can be misleading, because we cannot be by ourselves, alone.

Dear friends, I have seen deeply that nothing can be by itself alone, that everything has to inter-be with everything else. I have seen that all beings are endowed with the nature of awakening.

When we look deeply into nonself, we see that the existence of every single thing is possible only because of the existence of everything else. We see that everything else is the cause and condition for its existence. We see that everything else is in it.

imply that loving and craving are the same thing, and that the other person is just there to fulfill our needs. We might feel we can't survive without the other person. When we say, "Darling, I can't live without you. I need you," we think we're speaking the language of love. We even feel it's a compliment to the other person. But that need is actually a continuation of the original fear and desire that have been with us since we were small children.

A flower is not a flower. It is made only of non-flower elements — sunshine, clouds, time, space, earth, minerals, gardeners, and so on. A true flower contains the whole universe. If we return any one of these non-flower elements to its source, there will be no flower. That is why we can say, "A rose is not a rose. That is why it is an authentic rose." We have to remove our concept of rose if we want to touch the real rose.

The meditation on interdependence is to help one penetrate reality in order to be one with it, not to become caught up in philosophical opinion or meditation methods. The raft is used to cross the river. It isn't to be carried around on your shoulders. The finger which points at the moon isn't the moon itself.

When we look into the heart of a flower, we see clouds, sunshine, minerals, time, the earth, and everything else in the cosmos in it. Without clouds, there could be no rain, and there would be no flower. Without time, the flower could not bloom. In fact, the flower is made entirely of non flower elements; it has no independent, individual existence. It 'inter-is' with everything else in the universe.

A human being is made up of only non-human elements.

If we pollute the water and air, the vegetables and minerals, we destroy ourselves. We have to learn to see ourselves in things that we thought were outside of ourselves in order to dissolve false boundaries.

Bir insana, hiç kimseyle olmad???m?z gibi baÄŸl? olmak için, yan yana olmam?z gerekmez.

The destiny of humans cannot be separated from the destiny of earth.

The Earth is so integral in the unity of its functioning that every aspect of the Earth is affected by what happens to any component member of the community. Because of its organic quality, Earth cannot survive in fragments….The integral functioning of the planet must be preserved.

We must say of the universe that it is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects. 

realize that the universe is a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects.

I define game theory as the study of how rational individuals make choices when the better choice among two possibilities, or the best choice among several possibilities, depends on the choices that others will make or are making.

All things merge in one another - good into evil, generosity into justice, religion into politics...

Marriage transforms a distraction into a support, the power of which should be, and happily often is, in direct proportion to the degree of imbecility it supplants.

What I am in worldly estate, she is. What I become, she must become. What I cannot be, she cannot be. And shall I ever neglect her, or hurt her, or even forget to consider her? God forbid such a crime!

In making friends she was ever wary of people who foster dependency and feed on it.

No one can be successful by themselves. It's the relationships that you develop with the people around you.

We seem not to perceive that, by the law of nature, one generation is to another as one independent nation is to another.

He was simply not a "hero", which is to say, he did not let his relationship with the man be determined by the woman.